Then it was that the police and the soldiery showed how prepared they were for the outbreak, how admirable was their organisation. Suddenly down St. Bride Street, and moving by some inside and unseen motor-power, there appeared a procession of engines of war, the like of which none of the rioters had ever seen. These engines had been constructed secretly and in sections so as to be ready to put together and run out at a moment's notice, and had been concealed at the various fire stations till such time as they should be required. Imagine, if you can, that a square-built fort had suddenly detached itself at the corners, so as to break up into four armed sections, each of which presented on either side an iron-plated front, almost as steep and almost as high as the side of a house, with gun-mouths grinning out at regular intervals. Armoured trains the rioters had heard of, but armoured sides of an iron-built house, moving, each complete in itself, upon unseen wheels in a long procession down St. Bride Street, was something entirely new. For an instant the mob surged back, awed and wondering. Then, like an angry sea leaping against a breakwater, it flung itself forward upon the first of these new and advancing engines of war. But for the tragic loss of life, the impotency of the rush would have been ludicrous. It was as if a child, by the throwing of a handful of sand, had tried to stop a motor-car going at the top of its speed. The huge instrument of war not only did not swerve an inch from its course, but, so great was its weight, that it passed, without so much as a bump, over the bodies of those who fell beneath it, scrunching bone and limb into shapeless and quivering pulp. Then from either side belched sheets of flame, and, for the first time since the rising, the mob fell back and away, leaving the monsters of war-mechanism to accomplish their manœuvres unhindered. On the four moving walls filed, like a troop of ambling elephants. The foremost wheeled heavily round the obelisk in the centre of Ludgate Circus till it blocked London southwards by barricading off New Bridge Street and Blackfriars Bridge. The second steered round the obelisk westward, till it faced and closed Fleet Street. The third stretched itself eastward across the foot of Ludgate Hill; and the fourth, by spanning the road where St. Bride Street and Farringdon Street bifurcate, thus closed those roads to all comers.